View full sizeBenjamin Brink/The Oregonian The Miracles Club is a nonprofit organization for addicts based in Northeast Portland.
As King and surrounding neighborhoods evolve, newer residents increasingly complain about noise and crowds at the club. More and more, developers are looking to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard as the last frontier for the types of infill development that produce huge profits -- and gentrification.

Around the Miracles Club, they call Harry Watson "The Godfather."

He looks the part. Midnight-black suit topped by black fedora. Gold chains around his neck, gold rings on his fingers, gold teeth in his grin. He has the almost gaunt build of a heroin addict. But as the pendant around his neck professes, he's been clean 34 years.

That's long enough to have watched change creep through Northeast Portland, to have watched old black families in red-lined rental properties yield to investment-minded home buyers of all colors and boarded-up storefronts transform into brewpubs and breakfast joints.

It's also long enough to know that Miracles, the nonprofit club for addicts he helps lead, needs its own form of divine intervention.

As King and surrounding neighborhoods evolve, newer residents increasingly complain about noise and crowds at the club. More and more, developers are looking to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard as the last frontier for the types of infill development that produce huge profits – and gentrification.

"We're losing the battle out here," says Watson, 63.

He knows all about battles. When Watson entered recovery in 1972, saved by a prison stint for dealing, counselors openly doubted his chances. Black men can't get clean, they told him. African Americans can't stay sober in their own neighborhoods, in the places they did their drugs and committed their crimes.

View full sizeBenjamin Brink/The OregonianHarry Watson rapping on the street before he went into the 12th anniversary party at the Miracles Club in 2006.

Watson and the Miracles Club shatter those myths every day. Since its start 12 years ago, hundreds of people have confessed their sins at the club's 12-step meetings, sweated out their worries on its dance floor, filled their afternoons with impromptu games of dominos and chess, or stumbled in off the street for a ride to detox.

Treatment centers bus newly sober addicts to the old warehouse at MLK and Northeast Mason Street to show that they can still have fun. On Friday nights, members cart their children and grandchildren to play video games and party.

Almost all the club's members are African American. Most come from Northeast Portland.

Now they may have to find a new place to seek salvation.

"This is a cultural split, a black-and-white thing," Watson says. "Our culture is more vocal. We'll call to each other across the street. We'll play our music loud because we're so excited.

". . . What's going on here is that white people are moving in, and they don't want us around. It's almost like this white entitlement thing, 'We're here now, so you have to get out or change.' "

Neighbors complain

A block away, Peggy Whelan sighs, runs a hand through her silver hair and looks out the window of her mint-green bungalow.

"I hate to say this," she says, "but I think the problem here is a cultural clash.

"The culture I grew up in wasn't as vocal. We didn't blare our music out of the car. We didn't have conversations with people a block away.

". . . There's this entitled attitude that some people over at the club have, this, 'We were here first, so you just have to adjust' thing."

Whelan, 57, has lived cater-cornered from the Miracles Club for 6-1/2 years. Her house sits a block from MLK, a high-traffic area frequently on police reports.

"I've seen people smoking their pipes," she says. "There are people who walk up and down the street and are obviously looking for something."

Yet, she says, the Miracles Club poses perhaps the biggest challenge to her quiet lifestyle.

The noise begins every morning as early as 6:30 a.m., as club members arrive for the "early risers" Narcotics Anonymous meeting. It's a raucous, caffeinated crowd. Members holler to one another as they arrive, pull into the parking lot with stereos thumping. Afterward, they gather outside to smoke cigarettes and swap gossip and good-natured insults.

To participants, it's a glorious start to one more day at a time. To Whelan, it's a nuisance.

The club lacks air conditioning and insulation. On warm summer nights, when the dance floor crowds, members sometimes open the big garage door in back for a breeze. Even when the door is shut, a vent in the ceiling funnels music and laughter out into the neighborhood.

Whelan, also without central air conditioning, hears everything.

She began calling city regulators several years ago, and won some concessions through a mediated agreement between the club and the King Neighborhood Association. The club, for example, agreed to close at 8:30 p.m. during the week and to turn off the music at 11 p.m. on weekend nights, though members admit they don't always hit that. They also cracked down on who's allowed in the door during Friday "family nights" after nearby residents reported gunshots after a 2004 club event, according to city records.

Whelan wasn't the only one calling for help: Marlys Mock, who is raising her 3-year-old son in a house behind the club, echoes Whelan's complaints and her sighs: "All I want is for people to follow the law," she says. ". . . It's not just the club. Here in Northeast Portland, we're all very different. But we've all got to live together."

Neighbors say they know that members try. A few have been dismissive, Whelan says, such as the man who told her, "What did you expect? This isn't Lake Oswego."

Others have reached out to Whelan – she accepted an invitation, for example, for snow cones and hot dogs during this summer's National Night Out.

"I like a lot of the people, and I appreciate what they're trying to do," she says. "But black or white or whatever, this is a residential area. The entire neighborhood shouldn't have to participate."

Place of recovery

"We have to stay here," Lucy Mashia says. "If we go somewhere else, how will the people who need us find us?"

Mashia, 51, was one of those people not so long ago, an addict who walked the streets of Northeast Portland looking "to turn a date" to pay for her habit.

She worked a few nearby corners. More than once, her son's school bus passed as she trolled.

A dozen years ago, Mashia wandered into the Miracles Club. She took to haunting the place, showing up at sunrise and leaving only when the last of the cardplayers shut the lights for the night.

She had tried treatment before. Every time, she fell back into drugs and hustling. "My problem was that once I got out of treatment, I didn't have anyplace to go. I'm social," at this, she gives a little shimmy, "and everybody I knew before I found Miracles was using."

At the club, she met fellow addicts such as Sarah Friedel, the unofficial den mother, and Claudia Pepin, who tracks membership.

Friedel, 63, took her first baby step toward sobriety 26 years ago while a counselor and newspaper adviser at Roosevelt High School. One month, her charges devoted an issue to addiction. She asked a student with a drug problem to write about his recovery. He agreed – if she would attend a 12-step meeting with him.

Pepin, today a 47-year-old teacher's assistant and community college student, keeps photographic reminders in her billfold of how far she's come.

There's a shot of her scuba diving a few years ago, another of her working as a lifeguard. Then there's the wrinkled snapshot from February 2002. She's high on crack, beaming in a daze at the camera, hair out of control, black sweat shirt dirty and at least two sizes too large for her skeletal frame. Someone has scrawled on the back, "It ain't no use if you ain't got the boost."

A few months later, she found the Miracles Club.

Mashia, a drug counselor herself now, doesn't need such tokens for the rare time she's tempted to skip a meeting or claim she's cured.

All she has to do is think about her daughter, a recent graduate of Spellman College. Or her son, in prison for selling drugs.

Or she can simply stand outside after a morning meeting, one in which she took turns crying, laughing, yelling and holding a squirming baby while its mother testified. She can smoke a cigarette, finger the cross around her neck and, every now and then, watch the women pass on MLK.

"If they'd just come inside," she says in a soft voice. "It's the same thing with the people who complain about us. If they'd just come and see what we're about, we wouldn't have these problems."

Except, as Mashia knows, complaining neighbors aren't the real threat facing the Miracles Club. Just like the slow disappearance of the hookers and the dealers, they're merely symptoms and symbols of change.

Landlord sets deadline

Jack Gorman and Miracles Club board members gather around a card table in the club ballroom on a sunny Saturday morning, the place quiet except for the blip-blip-bleep of an arcade game and an occasional anxious sigh.

Gorman, the club's landlord, called a day earlier to request a meeting – immediately.

The Beaverton retiree paid $270,000 for two lots at MLK and Mason a decade ago. When he handed them the keys in 1998, Gorman made a promise: If I ever get an offer to sell, he said, you have 90 days to match. Guaranteed.

Now, fidgeting in his chair and squeezing a piece of paper in his hand, he looks as apologetic as his renters do uncertain.

"I need to tell you something," he says, tap-tap-tapping the paper against the table. "I need to give you a letter."

Five paragraphs say it all. A Japanese firm hoping to build high-rise apartments has offered him $1 million in cash. He's accepted, tentatively. It's the third offer in the past month.

Harry Watson, The Godfather, speaks up: "They're not going to want us here."

Gorman shakes his head, probably not. But true to his word, he's giving them three months to raise $500,000. If they succeed, he'll let them pay the rest in installments.

"If you can't, I think you've got a year, maybe two, before you need to move," Gorman says, still slapping his copy of the letter against the table.

The discussion begins: Where will they go? Like the rest of Northeast Portland, MLK will only keep changing as Mayor Tom Potter and the Portland Development Commission pump energy and cash into revitalizing the boulevard. City planners have struggled elsewhere in Northeast Portland to promote growth without gentrification.

"We're in a very vulnerable position," Watson says. "When people hear 'recovering addict,' they don't always hear the 'recovering' part."

Gorman leaves the table shaking his head and frowning, despite his good fortune. He's been generous with club leaders, including allowing them to fall two and even three months behind in rent at times, because he believes in their work.

"If I were them I'd go to an accountant and see about raising the money to buy the building," he says outside, flashing back to addicts he employed during careers in construction and retail. "People who have that kind of problem, they need this kind of environment to change."

A tall, bearded, defensive lineman of a man approaches. Elijah Cochran, another board member, asks if he missed the meeting.

"I had to start without you, big guy," Gorman tells him.

"Is it what I expected?"

"I'm afraid so."

They hug. Cochran heads in to confirm the bad news.

"It's people like that guy who make this so difficult," Gorman says. "You listen to their stories, and it's like, 'Of course I'll help.' " Looking forward

For a long time, Cochran could not bring himself to recount his own story, how he went from athlete to addict a few months after friends laced his marijuana pipe with crack.

He didn't talk about the crash and positive drug tests for cocaine that ended his TriMet career. "How stupid was I?" he says, "I didn't even know crack was cocaine."

That was 1991. For a few years, he'd go clean for 90 days, 30 days, a week, then go celebrate. Like Watson, he heard counselors say black men can't recover. Like Watson, he was often the only black person in the room at 12-step meetings. Nobody knew him, so they didn't expect him to talk and couldn't tell whether he was high.

Eventually, he found the men's group that started Miracles. Even then, he needed six months to admit he was an addict.

"They knew what I was," he says. "That's what got me over it: Being in a place where I had to talk about it"

Now a dozen years into recovery, he's at the club almost daily. Usually found in dusty overalls and a baseball cap, he personally laid the club's wooden dance floor and stays late Fridays to keep the music down.

A few weeks ago, Cochran helped organize the club's 12th anniversary party, a night of speeches, home movies and personal testimonials from dozens of members.

"Good evening," Cochran told the room when his turn came. "My name is Elijah, and I am a recovering drug addict."

Most in the crowd of 250 answered with applause and the traditional 12-step reply, "Hi, Elijah." Out of the din came another, smaller voice: "Hi, Dad."

Depending on how their hurried-up fundraising efforts go, the party may have been a grand last hurrah for the club in its current form and location.

Cochran, 53, is a contractor now, and his ringing cell phone and busy schedule are ubiquitous reminders of Northeast Portland's changes. He's still a tad amazed anyone would pay $1 million for land here, and that people gripe about the club but not the new pubs a few blocks away: "Except for race, what's the difference?"

Still, he's confident "the Miracles" will find either cash to save their home or a suitable replacement. Optimism, he says, is a basic requirement at the club.

"Without it," he says, "probably none of us would have made it this far to begin with."